Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/267

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or Stoddard's vanished city of the waste,—

and countless other passages as effective, than in the whole of Drake's "Culprit Fay," that being eminently a poem of fancy from beginning to end.

But the imagination is manifold and various. Among its offices, though often not as Inventive and constructive power. the most poetic, may be counted invention and construction. These, with characterization, are indeed the chief functions of the novelist. But the epic narratives have been each a growth, not a sudden formation, and the effective plots of the grand dramas—of Shakespeare's, for example—have mostly been found and utilized, rather than newly invented. "The Princess," "Aurora Leigh," and "Lucile" are almost the only successful modern instances of metrical tale-invention, and the last two are really novels in verse. The epic and dramatic poets give imagination play in depicting the event; the former, as Goethe writes to Schiller, conceiving it "as belonging completely to the past," and the latter "as belonging completely to the present." But neither has occasion to originate his story; his concern is with its ideal reconstruction.

The imagination, however, is purely creative in the work to which I have just said that it is not